SOURCE: Jentz, John B. “The 48ers and the Politics of the German Labor Movement in Chicago during the Civil War Era: Community Formation and the Rise of a Labor Press.” In The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940, edited by Elliott Shore, Ken Fones-Wolf, and James P. Danky, pp. 49-62. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

In the following essay, an earlier version of which was presented in 1988, Jentz describes the pivotal role of the leftist German-language press in the mid nineteenth-century American labor movement.

During the Civil War a vital interethnic labor movement emerged in Chicago, as in other major northern cities. The Chicago movement combined Irish, German, British, and native-born workers in numerous unions and created a city central body that published its own labor paper. After the war this labor movement made Chicago the center of a national campaign for the...